Assignment 8- Minahil Imtiaz

Reading this Narrative made me extremely sad and lose faith in humanity. It never occurred to me that in those times slaves were treated this cruelly more like animals by their fellow humans. As Fedrick Douglass tells us that he was deprived of one of the purest forms of love, his mother at a very tender age. It appears that slaves never got to experience any form of emotions or affection but only knew what punishments were, pleasing their masters were all they had known. As I skimmed through the chapters, the series of awful events witnessed by Fedrick spoke to me making me realize how important it was to put a stop to slavery. On page 11 the paragraph “…very many of their sleeping hours are consumed in preparing for the field the coming day; and when this is done, old and young, male and female, married and single, drop down side by side, on one common bed, — the cold, damp floor, — each covering himself or herself with their miserable blankets; and here they sleep till they are summoned to the field by the driver’s horn. At the sound of this, all must rise, and be off to the field. There must be no halting; every one must be at his or her post; and woe betides them who hear not this morning summons to the field; for if they are not awakened by the sense of hearing, they are by the sense of feeling: no age nor sex finds any favor. Mr. Severe, the overseer, used to stand by the door of the quarter, armed with a large hickory stick and heavy cowskin, ready to whip any one who was so unfortunate as not to hear, or, from any other cause, was prevented from being ready to start for the field at the sound of the horn.” After reading this paragraph I imaged what it would be like for us to be in their place and just by simply thinking about it I realized how they had to endure everything without saying a word. In these lines Fedrick drew a transparent picture of the struggles they had to go through, even after a long day of slavery they were still expected to set aside their own necessary chores like cooking and laundry to prepare for the upcoming day. There was no destined place for them to sleep on, they had to sleep on the hard floor even with all those bleeding bruises and sore bodies. They were treated as robots and expected to behave as such, dare if they may say, do or take a break they would be punished severely. Fedrick’s literacy style and syntax enhances the experience of its readers and makes them wonder what it might would have been like, drawing attention to struggles that have been overshadowed.